The cost of goods has steadily increased due to the increasing cost of production and manufacturing. The increase in cost of manufacturing may be contributed to many factors such as the increased cost of labor, increased cost of materials, and increased cost of energy. However, the increase cost of natural resources has the greatest influence on the cost of manufacturing and production of goods as it influences the cost of raw materials and the cost of energy. With manufacturing and production of goods increasing worldwide and with only a finite amount of natural resources to support the increase, the cost of natural resources will continually rise and the availability of the natural resources will diminish. Additionally, with the increased concern of global warming and the environment, the increase in use of natural resources will also increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The burning of fossil fuels is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, especially for production and manufacturing facilities which rely on fossil fuels in the form of coal, electricity derived from coal, natural gas, and oils. As a result, manufacturing and production companies have begun to look for ways to become more efficient by looking to achieve maximum product output from minimum resources consumed.
Natural resources are consumed in the production and manufacturing processes through the use of raw materials made from natural resources or through the energy created from natural resources. Better product designs, production processes, and tighter controls have decreased the amount of wasted raw materials in the production and manufacturing of goods. Most manufacturing companies have taken steps to reduce their energy consumption by replacing old, inefficient equipment with the energy efficient ones. However, replacing the old machines has its limits. Therefore, many companies have switched their focus on improving and optimizing the manufacturing or production process itself as a means of increasing energy efficiency, particularly the desire to monitor the relationship between energy and the associated costs versus production.
Product manufacturing or production optimization focuses on optimizing equipment use, operating procedures, or control procedures. Optimization can increase the efficiency of energy use by the production manufacturing process by decreasing the amount of time required to perform an operation, removing labor intensive operations, removing redundant steps, or removing operations which consume too much energy. Presently there are systems that are designed to monitor the operation of any component within a process. However none offer the comparison between the energy input to the production or manufacturing process and the output of the process (energy per unit produced). The current systems only offer aggregated process monitoring to look at the production and manufacturing process at a macro level and not at a micro level. Consequentially, the comparable technologies lack any statistical evaluation of the process energy intensity, the amount of energy used per unit of production. For this reason, present systems cannot accurately determine if the energy consumption of a production process can be attributed to, or affected by, a change in production, or equipment failure.
It is therefore, a principal object of this invention to provide a system that displays in an easily understandable form, the relationship of energy consumption and production output continuously in real-time as well as in summarized reports updated in real-time as well.
It is another object of this invention to provide a system that displays in an easily understandable form, the relationship of energy consumption and production output, as it compares to a historical average of energy consumption and production output.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a system that displays in an easily understandable form, the relationship of energy consumption and production output, as it compares to expected energy consumption and production output, and subsequently display a report of instances where energy consumption and production output exceeds preferred or statistical expectations.
It is a further object of this invention, to provide a system that will provide a warning, via a connected client interface, or electronic communication such as email, SMS, or other communication network, as to when the production system exceeds preferred or statistical expectations.